Unfortunately, with the barrage of information delivered by our perpetually shortening news cycle, participating in that process has never been more daunting for the average American. Fortunately, there are digital archivists who have been building tools to address this kind of issue around the world for decades and making sure that important information does not disappear may be easier than you think. This is the first in a series of articles meant to introduce these tools to those who have need for them in these trying times.
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So, what is the point of archiving? Well, lets say a mainstream news organization published an article titled “White Active Shooter in Denver” and then later changed that title, following the release of contradictory information, to “How Gun Control Can Stop Mass Shootings”, without appending an ‘edited’ marker, a few hours later. If I shared the link to the article on social media in the first hour after it was published, but those who received the shared link didn’t open it until the next day, there is going to be a lack of continuity between my commentary and the article they are visiting. Enter page archiving websites like archive.today and it’s many variations. There are a bunch of sites that provide page archiving services, but in my years of experience archive.today stands out as the least responsive to requests for takedown of lawful content while also providing the highest quality user experience.
Say you decided to use archive.today in the previous situation with the silently edited article. You visit the article within the first hour of it having been published and paste the link into archive.today. Archive.today then visits the site and creates a carbon copy of it that is timestamped and generates a link to access that copy. If you share that link the page that loads will always reflect its state at the time it was archived. Now here’s the coolest thing in my opinion. Say one of your friends read the archived article then visited the live page and pointed out to you that they differ. You can then archive the new edited page and compare the two. The differences can be commented on and this practice has a way of exposing the manipulative tactics that are used to shape a narrative. Archives made in this way are easily accessible and can be used to demonstrate the biases of individual authors, editors, and media organizations over time.
If archive.today and other similar websites are so great then why is there a need for any other kind of archiving? Well, I mentioned that these services tend to keep archives live and accessible which is true. However, they’re relatively untested when considering takedowns that originate from the government itself. In cases where data absolutely must be preserved there are ways to streamline the process of creating local archives on your computer and also places to backup to and share from that are explicitly designed to resist any form of censorship. I’ll be covering the creation of local archives of general information like webpages, videos, images, and documents next.
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Yea, we’re turning into a “river crab society” as they say in China.....
Yup, in many ways we’re further along than China because the free market has come up with fantastic advertising tools that can be repurposed for targeted censorship. Currently our government is just less willing to be hands on, using guns and batons, with censorship.
I don’t want to expose publicly some of the stuff that I’ve seen happening in mainland China, but rest assured they are also keeping archives that the government is unaware of and/or unable to censor. People want to be free. The Internet wants to be free.
Yea the thing that’s worrying me is that the censorship in the US is a lot more sneaky and sophisticated. Most people can’t tell it’s happening.
On top of that we also have sophisticated voter manipulation in use. https://aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies
Exactly, the thing that basically everyone forgets is that the USSR and the CCP have generated very few novel technologies. They’ve just taken what the free market in the west has created and run with it. People who suggest that the social credit score system is a Chinese invention are somehow blocking out the fact that we’ve had credit scores and SSN based tracking that is administered or bare minimum monitored by the government for decades now. Surveillance capitalism built the tools that authoritarian technocrats are now turning against the populace.
China saw what our intelligence community was developing with Google and Facebook and decided that they could do the same thing. They haven’t actually done anything that doesn’t already exist in the US though. If the alphabets want to send a packet around the world before it gets to your destination there are any number of ways that they can accomplish that very easily with minimal effort. Most of the time it’s just asking your ISP, but goes as deep as contributing intentionally flawed code to open source projects that will be integrated in basically every operating system.
I have always wondered about the possibility of intentionally flawed code being injected into open source projects.
Do you have any information about instances this has actually happened?
Excellent post and comments!
Heartbleed is one of the most widespread security flaws in history and the commit was from a government contractor.
EternalBlue is a tool created by the NSA to compromise Windows which leveraged multiple zero-days. The NSA intentionally didn’t disclose the existence of these exploits to Microsoft.
I’d also point to the revolving door for employees at companies like Microsoft and Apple to move into government work. Incentives are aligned in a similar way as politicians who hope to move into lobbyist roles after their term ends, it’s just reversed.
This gives all participants in spy craft like this plausible deniability. However, over many instances there seems to be a pattern of employees intentionally creating back doors or other vulnerabilities for alphabet soup.
China aint shyte without American tax dollars, never was, never could be without us and our commie globalist suckin, fang fang spy fckn, sellout traitorous cuckin, potato luvin government fulla kid touchin, pos's
Yup, that’s a good one.
Also check out:
What about trying to red pill someone on Floyd and Facebook is hiding my comments on the medical autopsy report and a picture of Floyd swallowing fentanyl
You’re asking how you could get around the Facebook censorship?
Yeah and the fact that some people still aren’t red pulled is amazing when censorship is reaching ccp levels
So this isn’t specifically advice for Floyd Redpilling but it’s definitely applicable. Most people aren’t holding onto their false beliefs because they have a well reasoned argument. Here are the primary reasons that I’ve encountered and strategies to subvert them.
(1) Doesn’t engage in anything other than mainstream media.
These are some of the low hanging fruits. Typically they just lack the initiative for whatever reason to investigate the stories they see on the mainstream media further. The most effective, although relatively slow, strategy here is to pull them away from mainstream media routines and engage them nature. Seems like this wouldn’t have a big impact, but the neutral human brain becomes inquisitive when it gets bored in nature and it will go back and question narratives. This has the added benefit of having them largely redpoll themselves. Sprinkle in alternate news sources on the left and right and talk to them about both, defending your opinion.
(2) Has had a strong anecdotal experience that underpins their belief structure.
The only way I’ve successfully redpilled in this situation is by going to leftist and centrist events with them and asking questions. Direct redpilling makes them more defensive, but watching their chosen ideology attack someone they know for engaging in an argument is a more passive redpill.
(3) Thinks that they’re redpilled.
Most of the time just leave this person alone while making sure they don’t go off the deep end.
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Basically, just keep talking to them. Keep speaking about what you know to be true. Either they admit you’re right or the persecution and adversity you experience undermines the moral foundation of their position. It’s a slow game in the end.
Oh, also there are some things to do with images if you’re proficient with image editing software like photoshop. It’s always a game of whackamole, but in my experience doing palette shifts (basically messing with the color balance of the image) along with minor distortions like skews of 1-5 degrees works well. Most people won’t notice the difference because for the time being human brains are still better and pattern detection than algorithms.
If you ever find that you’re being blocked for posting a specific face to social media considering using the following program to get around the filter:
It basically adds in digital noise that makes it basically impossible for an algorithm to do facial recognition (Microsoft is trying hard to beat it though) while leaving it completely intact for human viewers who won’t notice the difference. I personally use it on any picture of myself or my family members even though I know it’s a losing battle because of genetic testing records, genetic material collection during COVID, and full models that are created by passive surveillance systems from Amazon/Facebook/AlphabetSoup.
Its impossible to whistle blow or get real information out there. I've had proof Seth Rich leaked the DNC emails for over 12 months. I've done everything in my power to get the information out there. It's impossible, even on this site.
Throw your proof on IPFS. Use Ricochet to share it with journalists like Greenwald. Print it out and hand it to people. Put it in newspaper racks. Etc. There’s always a way.
Thank you for this!
No problem, next part will be going up in the next six hours or so hopefully.
Extremely important! Thanks pede!
Local copies are the best but the cloud is more practical.
I like distributed peer based systems for storage first (like IPFS), but always keep a local copy as well and spread it to any other archives that are available to be sure it doesn’t disappear.
But, muh violence and muh hate speech...
The problem with trusting local archives of websites is that they can be easily tampered with. Those third-party websites are ones that are viewed as reliable and trustworthy, but that's lost when it's just some anonymous guy sharing an archive.
I agree, which is why these public archives are important. I’d rather have local archives than no archives though. There’s some cool proof of existence stuff with blockchain that could be used to verify the integrity of local archives against a tamper resistant file hash record but it’s cost prohibitive at the moment on ethereum. Most users are too retarded to care about that kind of verification at the moment which is why I haven’t pursued it further.
The best approach I’ve found is generating as many different archival formats as possible for sites and videos. If I have a PDF of a YouTube Page, the video in three formats, the full channel digest with the video listed, key frames at set percentages of play, and various other things I find that it’s fairly easy to defend the existence of that media.
I believe this is a problem that ipfs is well suited to solving. The only issue, is that the ipfs technology is very new, however Brave browser already includes built in support for it.
The beauty of it is that you can mirror many copies of the data across many different servers and you still only need 1 address It's also completely anonymous, so impossible to take down.
http://ipfs.io
I do think that once an open source gateway package is available for IPFS that it’s going to get a whole lot cheaper (it’s already cheap) and a whole lot more accessible. Right now it’s basically piñata and eternium who pin content but operations like cloudflare are clearly interested as well.
Yup, you also bypass DNS and associated filters if you access the resource directly through IPNS. Problem is that IPFS is a peer-based system fundamentally so you’re exposing your IP Address or end up wondering how trustworthy your VPN provider actually is.
I’m hopeful that technologies like Starlink that operate outside the jurisdiction of any nation are going to facilitate actual anonymity, but that’s just a hope. You’ve got to have a lot of buy in from the government to be launching satellites so you’re probably an asset to some degree.
Yes, local archives are better than nothing at all, but it's still important to remember all of that can be faked.
Absolutely, healthy skepticism.
Do we need to go back to taking a photograph of the computer monitor to archive something? I'm serious, that would be a weird low-tech solution.
That's just as easy to fake, just fake the website first. You pretty much have to take it on trust, as far as I'm aware.
You certainly can do that, but it’s trust based as duckduck said. There are technological solutions, but they are fairly new with unknown flaws. Not stable enough for me to be comfortable recommending them. One example is:
That would allow a primary trusted archive like archive.today to write a file hash (unique identifier) for the archived page into the ethereum blockchain (currently costs about $14 but that will go down or be engineered around) which will preserve it indefinitely. Then, in any future posts of the archived page from anyone anywhere the hash could be posted and reference the stored hash which would is verifiable as a match for the viewer.
Most likely this is going to end up being incorporated into a browser through an extension or into a local application on your computer that does these steps automatically (meaning you have to trust it to not lie to you still).
The main reason I’m writing this series is to let people know what is out there and that there are ways to combat censorship. The enemy will always be evolving and we need to be doing the same. Knowing that every pede has a foundational understanding of topics like this is essential for a productive dialogue when it matters.
Good info, thanks. Will be looking for the info on decentralized archiving.
Great, well-thought out post. Thank you for it. You're 100% right.
I love that you’ve pissed off so many people that this comment is being downvoted indirectly by idiots who went to your profile and downvoted everything.
It doesn't bother me. If someone wants to waste their time doing that, that's fine. Reasonable people know I'm right. And when I'm wrong, I'll say I'm wrong.
I respect that.